Defining psychiatry: Aubrey Lewis's 1938 report and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Abstract

Aubrey Lewis finished his report on psychiatry in Europe in 1938, having travelled to centres of psychiatry and allied fields on the Continent between March and September 1937. He had been at the Maudsley Hospital for nine years, with five years as a consultant and one as clinical director. While Lewis stated that the aim of the trip to the Continent was "to learn what is being done in neuropsychiatry and related fields", saying that it was "at the suggestion and with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation",1 it is worth dwelling on the question of the wider aims it may have served. The trip can be located in the context of Edward Mapother's desire to create an outstanding institution which would foster research, raise teaching and training standards, and thereby raise the quality and status of psychiatry in England.2 Mapother, keen to groom individuals who would pursue the same goals of institutional, disciplinary and scientific excellence which he admired in American psychiatry, and having Lewis in